Fastest trending viral videos on YouTube

Written By MR on Tuesday, January 10, 2012 | Tuesday, January 10, 2012

The fastest trending viral brand is YouTube. Created in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006, YouTube grew to become the second-most used search engine in the world, parent-company Google being the biggest search engine.

Following Google and Facebook, YouTube has grown into the third most visited website with 48 hours of videos uploaded every minute. That is the equivalent of 240,000 full-length films every week or nearly 8 years of viewing content uploaded every day. 3 billion YouTube videos are viewed by 20 million people every day. Hard to believe, but that is an average of 150 video views per visitor per day… even with many videos being only a few seconds in duration.

First video on YouTube

The very first video uploaded to YouTube is still there. Co-founder Jawed Karim’s “Me at the zoo” was uploaded at 8:27 pm on Saturday April 23rd, 2005 and has been viewed more than 5 million times. It’s only 19 seconds in duration and not quite the most exciting video out there which perhaps is why it has not gone viral. True viral videos would rack up that amount of views within a day. In comparison, Susan Boyle’s video was watched more than 100 million times in less than 2 weeks after it was uploaded.

What does “Viral” mean?

The saying “Going viral” comes from the term “Viral Marketing” which is said to have been originated by Tim Draper and Jeffrey Rayport to explain the popularity of a product spreading like a virus. Which aptly describes YouTube, by far the most dominant video viewing service in the world.

Fastest trending viral videos

The word viral is now ubiquitously associated with trending YouTube videos. A video made famous by Internet users sharing it on social networks and through email can bring shame on the unscrupulous but can also bring stardom – and wealth – to an artist, votes for a politician, laughs at pranks, support for good causes, and respect for supporters of animal rights.